Dr. Susan Park, from the University of Sydney and Dr. Teresa Kramarz from the Munk School of Global Affairs in the University of Toronto were awarded one of the Venture Research Grants from the International Studies Association for their work on accountability in environmental governance. Dr. Park and Dr. Kramarz direct a research network of over 30 scholars who publish on various dimensions of accountability in different environmental issue areas and across public, private and hybrid governance systems.
International Studies Association Venture Research Grants: These grants provide support to innovative and pioneering research. They allow for the pursuit of potentially transformative research areas, or to engage in preliminary work on untested or novel areas of research.
Venture Research Grants are worth up to $25,000.
Upcoming Workshop: Accountability in Global Environmental Governance – February 2015
The purpose of this workshop is to engage in innovative preliminary research on Accountability in Global Environmental Governance (AGEG). The global environmental governance (GEG) literature acknowledges that it is failing to prevent environmental deterioration across a range of indicators and fingers point to a culture of unaccountability as being partly responsible (Najim and Halle 2010). GEG stretches from environmental regimes and institutions, to International Organizations that include environmental issues under their mandate, as well as public and private voluntary efforts to manage environmental problems. There is a recognizable gap in the field that thoroughly investigates the role accountability plays in the effectiveness of GEG (Gupta and Biermann 2011). This workshop seeks to identify how to best investigate whether accountability is a problem in global environmental governance and to examine the linkages between ‘accountability gaps’ and global environmental governance effectiveness, or the extent to which regimes, institutions, organizations and actors are held to account for their actions in mitigating adverse environmental impacts in governing specific issue areas.
The workshop invites specialists in GEG to engage with a common analytical framework of accountability as proposed by the workshop conveners, Drs. Teresa Kramarz and Susan Park, to examine accountability gaps within their specific issue area and to identify whether these gaps are a governance problem and can be ameliorated. The papers will be published as a special edition of a leading environmental politics journal.
The report for the previous workshop in March 2014 can be found here.
